As rumoured Microsoft has announed today that it will be buying Mojang. Mojang is the development studio behind the hugely popular 8-bit game Minecraft. Mojang could be very valuable for Microsoft because it can help attracting as many people as possible to step into the Microsoft world and use it’s set of products.

The original create of Minecraft, Markus Persson (better known as Notch), is apparently not becoming a Microsoft employee however, he and his fellow founders will move on to start new, smaller, projects. As Notch says:

“I was at home with a bad cold a couple of weeks ago when the internet exploded with hate against me over some kind of EULA situation that I had nothing to do with,” he wrote. “I was confused. I didn’t understand. I tweeted this in frustration. Later on, I watched the This is Phil Fish video on YouTube and started to realize I didn’t have the connection to my fans I thought I had. I’ve become a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me.”

He also mentioned that the deal is not about the money.

Microsoft says that the game will be kept available on all platforms and will not limit it to Windows. There’s a big chance however that Microsoft will add support for Windows Phone, which is currently not supported by Minecraft.

You can find the official announcement here, as well as Notch’s message that he’ll be leaving Mojang.